Social Entrepreneurs Use 'Tactical Urbanism' To Create Walkable Communities

How best to help urban communities become more walkable, livable, less car-dependent and, well, more like real communities? That question is at the heart of Street Plans Collaborative, a Miami Beach and New York City-based urban planning, design and research firm.

Its answer: To accomplish that goal through many pint-sized projects, each of which doesn’t take a long time to complete.

The company also recently won $150,000 in the Knight Foundation Cities Challenge for a program in Miami-Dade County to build low-cost, quick-build local transportation and open space projects. That's being done in partnership with the Miami-Dade County Department of Transportation and Green Mobility Network, a local transportation nonprofit.

Tony GarciaTony Garcia

“One of our main goals is to help officials think about small-scale projects as a way of addressing our transportation needs, rather than focusing on big-ticket items,” says co-founder Tony Garcia. “You can do a lot more with smaller-size projects.”

The money will fund the second year of the project. Called the Miami-Dade Transportation Quick-Build Program, it got started earlier this year with a different $180,000 grant. The aim is to provide funding and technical assistance to anyone who wants to make short-term, low-cost transportation improvements—think biking and pedestrian infrastructure and local transit—to their neighborhoods.

To that end, the program asked residents, as well as officials, to come up with ideas. Some suggestions included creating dedicated bus and bike lanes, as well as cross walks, which are often more efficient than regular street crossings.

“These are things that we will do from now to the end of the year,” says Garcia. “It won’t take 10 years.”

The company's philosophy is something Garcia and co-founder Mike Lydon call “tactical urbanism” . Wikipedia’s definition: “An umbrella term used to describe a collection of low-cost, temporary changes to the built environment, usually in cities, intended to improve local neighborhoods and city gathering places.” It includes such factors as focusing on low-risk, potentially high-reward projects and a collaboration between the public and private sectors and regular citizens.

When Garcia and Lydon started thinking about founding their own company in 2008, they were both working for other urban design and planning firms by day. There, they were frustrated by how long it took to get anything accomplished. “Plans never really went anywhere,” says Garcia. “They sat on shelves.” By night, however, they were blogging about and advocating for building walkable communities. In 2009, they founded Street Plans.

The company is also working with the City of West Palm Beach, another Knight winner, to activate vacant storefronts in downtown West Palm Beach and turn them into popups.